Page:Hine (1904) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/146

 to enable the farm hand to become something else, say a wood chopper or a lumberman. Can we expect our car repairers, our sectionmen, to be loyal and faithful if we lay them off with necessary work in sight, simply to make our books look better? They know that later on we shall, at the last minute, at the scratch of an indefinite somebody’s pen, put on a big force and with a hurrah, boys, rush it through. Is this fair? Is it not better to keep twenty men steadily employed than to have forty on half time? The unquestioned deterioration in the quality of our labor, in the morale of our forces, can- not all be laid on the union’s doorstep. There is a responsibility here which we cannot shirk.

Cutting down expenses has been done in an unintelligent, cold-blooded sort of a way. We go home at night feeling good at having cut down our payrolls. We should be feeling sorry at the necessity for taking from men the wherewithal to pay the unceasing rent and grocery bills. Our methods give some room for the populists’ plea to put the man above the dollar. No, I do not expect ever to see an entire correction of these